I was born six decades ago. That is of little matter, but I was born into a Christian family in a Christian culture. I did not have real terrors of any other faith; just of the faith of my fathers. No surprise. I also, unfortunately, did not really see examination of belief systems overall as substantially other than questioning the premises of Christianity. No surprise here, either. In this way I wasted, more or less, six decades, more or less.
A few years ago, on a drowsy, achy morning, as I recall, I had what for me seemed like a vision of the suffering of Jesus. To me the suffering mattered most in that I felt that Jesus' suffering was best understood as an outpouring of his mercy. Mercilessness, I decided, must be the great evil of the universe, and the property of mercy--or the lack thereof--was to be the key to rightly understanding religion and everything.
So I set out to view existence through a lens of mercy, as a way of understanding and organizing all the other elements of existence I had ever known. The single element of mercy was to be the one thing that mattered. What followed for me was an amazing series of vision-like understandings about existence. Suddenly, one by one, concepts that I had long viewed in a conventional way seemed surprisingly different. Time didn't matter so much; space didn't matter so much; order and orderly progression didn't matter so much; logic, of course, didn't matter so much.
I was drawn time and again to the imagery of the Garden of Gethsemane, and--surprise, surprise--to the parallels so many have noted to the other Garden, Eden. Yet something utterly surprising seemed to be rising up to me out of all my wonderings--an organizing principle that seems now so logical yet which it did not seem logic itself would provide for me. This utterly surprising thing was the phrase (four-syllable, like the other mnemonics I employed to track my vision-y quest): Roused, Readied, Reaped.
I had "visions"--most notably one of humans being "roused". I recall looking into the darkness of one night and thinking of the disciples roused--unwillingly, as is usually the case with us--to Jesus' warning of the coming crowd. In time I came to include the rousings in the Garden of Eden. Roused, Readied, Reaped--the notion of a cycle or an arc kept coming back to me.
It took me a few years to understand the most basic impact that "roused, readied, reaped" had on me. As I have tried to write in this blog, the "roused, readied, reaped" progression describes not reality--not really--but rather that "reality" formed by the limitations of our viewpoints and understandings. For example, we cannot view time as something independent of the fragmented, ever-changing, intrinsically organic and participatory glimpses we experience. The notion of "Time" as an infinite, linear property is an abstraction--effectively, a non-reality.
It is no great feat to deny definitive existence to those great principles and dimensions that we imagine can frame our understandings of the universe. Things like time, and space, and the ostensible distinction between the real and the (ostensibly existing) supernatural are things we experience only through the organic fits and spasms of our existences. It is no element of vision that would allow us (allow me, as I fancied) to see a universe devoid of some one or another supposedly indispensable property, some property that we had been taught must surely be there. All we need do is allow our imagination to run up against our inherently imaginary grasp of the great principles that daily we take for granted.
So I had to admit to myself that I was having no visions; I was having their opposite--"de-visions," if you will. I was taking successive turns at seeing existence as though this or that conceptual presupposition did not matter. Since I cannot see something like time in its entirety or in all its manifestations, then it is no more a vision to imagine time as non-existent than it is to imagine time as infinite.
Neither was I subsuming all reality under some new or newly-discovered organizing principle. My attachment to "mercy," I think I must admit, really came from me having a visceral attachment to mercy--maybe someday I will make some discovery about what that means to me. Maybe I will write it in a blog that will be read only by me.
What I was really doing was developing--most imperfectly--a way to read the only books that I will ever care most about: the canonical Gospels. Surely by now you will not expect me to launch into some description of those writings as being sublimely superior to all other sacred texts. That is something about which I have no idea. What I have discovered, somewhat, is what it is to read and examine the teachings of Jesus in light of the flickering light we see as we slumber, are roused, are readied by experience, and are reaped in our exhaustions, our failures, and our meager offered accomplishments.
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